#3 PRIVATE VIEW

Annelies Van Parys (*1975)Opera in four acts Libretto by Jen HadfieldIn English, with English and French surtitles

Private View has won the prize for Best Production at the Armel Opera Festival in Budapest.

After the performance you have the opportunity to meet the composer Annelies Van Parys.

[EN]Spying on the neighbours, it’s something we all do once in a while. But who is this “other”, and what can we know about him by looking at him? Is what we see always the truth, or do we colour in the picture with our own judgements and prejudices? And how much does looking make us complicit in what we see? When should we intervene? And can shared fear draw people out of isolation, or does it actually drive them apart? These are the highly topical questions at the heart of Private View, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition that combines suspense and tongue-in-cheek humour.

The composer Annelies Van Parys had two themes in mind for her first opera: voyeurism and social isolation. Private View is set in the closed world of a block of flats; the occupants have withdrawn entirely into themselves, and hardly know their neighbours. The characters in Gaea Schoeters’ scenario and Jen Hadfield’s playful, ambiguous libretto are also reduced to archetypes, metaphors for patterns of human relations, traced out only by their actions or inaction.

As directed by Tom Creed, the singers of Die Neue Vocalsolisten are no longer classical protagonists; in a deliberate intervention, the Collective 33 ⅓ “neutralises” them, thus making them “operators”. Using found footage from old films, this video collective drives the story forward while maintaining its ambiguity; nothing is unequivocally true or untrue, and everything remains open to interpretation.

It is not only the characters who are guilty of gratuitous spying; Private View also forces the audience into the role of super-spy and thus makes them complicit. In this way, the audience is confronted with its own role as voyeur and is compelled to reflect on the responsibility that looking brings with it. Although right up to the end they can use the excuse that they are not sure what they have seen. Because nothing is unequivocal and images often lie. What we see is only true to the extent that we believe or want to believe that it really happened. Or didn’t.

» The music supporting all this feels like an overwhelming encyclopaedia of colors dragging us along into an avalanche of sliding notes, disturbing rustles, tender punctuation and pounding hysteria. Van Parys has armed all her characters with a singular musical identity, which results in fascinating fireworks, especially during dialogues. Underlying this chromatic landscape we sense a premeditated structure, which only slowly reveals its secrets: you end up wanting to hear it again, possibly with your eyes closed and your own imagination turned on. De Standart

» While night falls, the comforting music becomes a strident lamentation. Annelies Van Parys changed the song Ruhe, schönstes Glück der Erde into a contemporary composition with dissonant slips. De Standaard on RUHE, 2007